


everybody looks so luminous

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Heroes, Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: F/F, Flashbacks, Multiple Universes Colliding, Pining, Time Travel, i don't even know how to describe all the time- and space-jumping lucina does honestly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-02-28 20:23:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13279191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: “You and I are running out of time,” Azura finishes. She touches the words to the bare skin of Lucina’s throat. She does not clarify if she meansfor tonightorfor always.A world away from Askr and Lucina still has not forgotten.





	everybody looks so luminous

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: this happened because I decided on a whim to support Marthcina and Axezura on my FEH file and immediately fell into hell because FRAUGHT FACE-HIDING! SENSUOUS MASK/VEIL REMOVAL! PINING! MYSTERIOUS PRINCESSES ON SECRET MISSIONS FINDING ULTIMATELY TEMPORARY SOLACE IN EACH OTHER,
> 
> Title from "Nothing Without You" by Vienna Teng, which I have decided is Their Song, because "I am nothing without you, but I don't know who you are" is so very relevant.

The night is dark on the other side of the doorway that leads back into time, but for the fire in the trees, and a drawn blade flashing.

Even from this distance Lucina knows that sword like she knows her own name. Now, lingering in the corridor between one world and its neighbor, she knows she is—at last, _at last_ —where she must be.

Trusting in the mask she wears and the blade at her side, she runs for the portal and leaps.

 

* * *

 

Askr is not her place. Askr is only a passing storm. She does not yet know what accident of time had pulled her here, so powerfully all her strength had not been enough to turn aside; now the days feel like they run differently, and every delay feels almost more costly than she can bear, as if she half-expects to reemerge into her own world only to find that too many centuries have passed, and with them all her hope.

At the top of an empty stairway that leads into an upper tower Lucina leans her shoulder against the wall and sheds her mask, tries to gather her strength. Here, where no one else seems to come, it’s only her. Only Lucina again. She touches her fingertips to the exposed skin of her cheekbone, feels the high plane of bone just under her left eye reassuring her that her own face is still much as she remembers, and breathes.

The song catches her on her next inhale, an unfamiliar melody rippling sad and sweet as the morning tide over the stones, moving down in gentle circles to where Lucina stands, beckoning. Despite herself, Lucina follows the sound. She does not replace her mask.

The girl in the room where the song leads, a single chamber at the end of the hall, stands at a window that opens out into the sky. Lucina’s eyes have just enough time to focus on her image—tall and straight and slender and dressed in midnight blue, long skirt split all up one side like a dancer’s, and such hair, so much hair it looks about to swallow her—before the song stops.

The sudden crackling, hot swell of something like shame flowers in Lucina’s gut, and she drops her eyes to the ground.

“Forgive me,” she says. “I heard your voice and I…” She realizes belatedly that she has no idea what should come at the end of that sentence. _I heard your voice, and had to go and find you. Because, because—_

“No, please. I forget myself sometimes. No one usually comes this way; they tire quickly of the stairs.” The girl speaks softly, thoughtfully, mostly to herself. But then she inclines her head, as though she’s calling herself to attention, and Lucina sees her gaze is keen. “You are newly summoned to Askr, then…?”

The edge of the question tilts upwards, and Lucina hears the silent invitation—to answer, to join some imaginary sort of dance. “You may call me Marth.”

“Marth.” She has this peculiar, floating way around words, such that she makes even this name that is not Lucina’s sound like a hymn. Peculiar eyes, too, such a warm, light brown as to be nearly golden; they go warmer still when she smiles. “Marth, like the Hero-King of Archanea?”

Lucina can only nod. This girl must know the tales. She does not imagine she herself will figure into any stories past or future, but striving to own the name gives her courage when there are few other sources to draw it from. And here in this world that seems to be between worlds she finds it takes more courage than she might ever have imagined, to ask questions of her own.

“And yours, milady?”

“Azura,” the girl says.

 

* * *

 

She is a princess and a swordswoman and a soldier; she is Lucina of Ylisse, firstborn of the Exalt, heir to the halidom; she is somebody’s daughter and somebody’s friend and her own final hope, and over and above all else she is _Lucina_ , the seeker, the gambler, the girl who had cut a path open into the past and led the way.

But here she is Marth, which is the shorthand way she has chosen to say she is anyone, or no one—and in Regna Ferox it just so happens that anyone who can wield a blade can be the khan’s champion, and dine at their table. It does not matter that she speaks to no one and answers no questions. The sword at her side and the strength of her arm are all that matter for the moment, and she will take what small comfort that knowledge offers, gladly, silently.

The khan’s power makes him joyful, so some nights there is music in his stronghold, resounding through the banquet hall at suppertime. Some nights, there are fire-breathers. Tonight, a dancer—the khan’s favorite, a young woman named Olivia he says he cherishes like a daughter, precious and lovely as a jewel, bright as a star in the night.

Lucina nods her head, and faces out toward the floor, and fixes her eyes forward with all the respect she can accord. She continues to nod when the khan remarks upon it; she must surely have a refined eye, like a true champion, to know beauty when she sees it.

Lucina does not say that she watches so closely because she is too familiar, this Olivia. Lucina cannot tell anyone that it aches to look at her, or any of the reasons why.

 

* * *

 

“Azura will be with you for the moonrise watch tonight,” Commander Anna tells her, pointing with one arm up the stairway. “She should already be waiting at the top.” And then she winks, as if she has a secret. “You’ll like her, don’t worry, she won’t make you talk.”

With a bowed head and murmured thanks Lucina ascends the steps, one hand on the stones of the wall at her left to keep her footing sure, until the floor beneath her feet flattens, and the open door before her shows her a sky full of foreign, unnameable stars.

Azura is waiting by the parapet along the eastern wall, the shape of her by torchlight already familiar enough to walk toward without hesitation. It’s only when she draws nearer that Lucina sees the veil that covers her face from the eyes down.

“I had wondered who might take the watch with me.”

Lucina’s cheeks flush warm beneath the mask, for all that her lips and fingertips have just as quickly gone cold where the night breezes have touched them. “The commander was very accommodating of my request for quiet.”

Lucina suspects the sound Azura makes might be a laugh, though the wind snatches it away too quickly to make sure. “The commander thinks it best to let the heroes be as they are. The Order welcomes all kinds, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

It’s certainly true that none of them lack for kindness in Askr. Lucina has begun to think that that is perhaps its own danger, what this world might offer her. This war the summoner and prince and princess and their order of heroes are fighting is not Lucina’s war, and she has yet to decide how much of herself she can give to it. And yet it would be easier than anything to linger here, to fight and feast and sing, to have comrades to share the fireside and the night watch with. Such things as she has not had since, since—

“Where did you learn to sing?”

Asking questions is another danger; it takes too much courage when she knows full well she should be keeping it close. Guarding it. Hoarding it. Taking care not to share herself or to take of what anyone else might share in turn, and yet—

“From my mother.” Azura gives the answer readily, Lucina notes, but offers no story to enflesh it with. Instead, another question: “Where did you learn your way with a blade?”

_Go on, Lucina. Say another foolish thing._

“From my father.” It feels like too truthful an answer, for all its careful spareness, matched to Azura’s word for word. “You and I must be more alike than we appear.”

Masked and veiled as they are now, they can barely see each other’s faces, and yet what is it about Azura, Lucina wonders, that reaches out and undoes all her protections even so?

“I feel the same, I’m afraid. I wonder if it’s true.” When Azura moves, the wind catches at her dress, whips her skirt around and around until it brushes Lucina’s knees as she passes. “I suppose if we both sojourn here long enough, we may find out. Come, Hero-King. To the east.”

 

* * *

 

When the war with Plegia ends, the halidom goes into mourning for its Exalt. After nine days of grief, it crowns a new one, and then it sees him wed. So much has happened, and yet this is nowhere near the end of the story as Lucina knows it.

She has never felt more keenly that this is not her time. But Ylisstol is still her city, so she goes out into the street and walks among the crowds like a shadow, and thinks about all the festivals she’s ever been to, blurring into one. A funeral and a wedding and a coronation, a feast and a bonfire and a dance. The dissonance should be painful, but Lucina knows intimately what it means to have joy and sorrow walking hand in hand through the days. It is not so different here, in this place, so many years in the past. To spread the table for the living can be prayer, too, in a way. Dancing can be how someone mourns.

Two years after the end of this first war, she knows the princess will be born. Her name will be Lucina, and her left eye will be bluer and clearer-sighted than her right, because it carries the Brand. Her birth will bring rejoicing back to the land, will be for the first time in years a pure cause for joy, and no one will be able to look past the light she bears and into her future, not yet.

 

* * *

 

Lucina is recovering in the castle infirmary when Azura comes to return her mask.

The infirmary is lit by yellow-white orbs of pure magic, and standing by her bedside all lit up like this Azura looks smaller, exposed and somehow delicate. “After they took you away, I stayed behind to gather the pieces. Princess Sharena told me I could go to Lucius for small magics, mending broken things, and the like.”

She remembers in bits and pieces how they had gone into battle to retake a stronghold on the northern border, how a swordsman had blindsided her among the rocks on the mountainside. She remembers her cursed, exhausted, slow arm, her mask sliced in two on the ground, blood running between her eyes. Azura, guarding her back, singing to her, and for one stroke only she had felt restored. Then, at least, it had been enough.

That song had stayed with her all through the last throes of the battle, even as Lady Mathilda had hauled Lucina up before her on the back of her horse and borne her like a child back to the castle, even as the healers had opened their arms to receive her and laid her in this bed. She cannot tell now how many days she’s been half-asleep and dreaming, fighting to draw up every breath from the deep places where her ribs had shattered, but Azura’s song persists, past everything.

The wound on her face is shallow, but long and stinging, arcing downward from the center of her forehead and under her left eye. Lucina knows she might have lost it entirely had she turned her head just a fraction too far to one side. As it is she’s lucky she’ll come away with only a scar—and a faint one, at that, if the healers are as conscientious with their spells as she knows them to be. She can already imagine it, the white crooked crescent-shape no one is likely to even see, unless they’re standing too close.

“Thank you,” she says—or means to say, except it seems her voice has melted in her throat, and all that comes out is a breathy, feeble sound.

Still, Azura must have heard, because she shakes her head; Lucina watches her veils follow the movement and marks the ripples they make in the still air. “It is important to you, I know.”

This, and everything it stands for. For the first time, Lucina wonders if she might do worse than tell Azura what it all means. That the mask had been a gift from someone she promised to meet again. That she needs it so she doesn’t forget how she left her world to change the future, that she cannot die before she sees it done. They’ve only ever talked about it aslant, in whispers and in riddles, but it’s entirely conceivable to Lucina that Azura has pieced together all the truth from those fragments already. Perhaps she knows because she follows a similar spiraling path.

“Still, I thank you.” Lucina coughs to clear her throat. “It does not have to matter to you that it is.”

“You’d best believe that I wish it did not.” For the first time, Azura hesitates. Her fingers lift and bloom toward Lucina, pause a hair’s breadth away before they close the distance, brushing over her cheek. She is careful to avoid the wound, tracing instead the curve below Lucina’s cheekbone where the mask’s left side ends when it sits on her face. “Such songs I hear when I look at you. Whatever it is I hear, it refuses to fade.” The pad of her thumb arcs downward, lingering by the corner of Lucina’s mouth, and surely, surely, Azura must feel Lucina hold her breath, from the way she smiles. “That is all the reason I have.”

They linger there a heartbeat, and then another. When Azura makes to move away, Lucina summons what remains of her strength, and takes her hand.

 

* * *

 

Lucina knows better than to search for her, but there is no accounting for the times that she appears regardless, in glimmering fragments. Azura in the shadow of every dancing girl sketching whirlpools with her steps across a tavern floor or a castle hall. Azura in the rippling notes of lute and flute and viol, in steel spearheads veined with silver, in a handful of gold coins. Azura, Azura, _Azura_ , evening star and bend in the river and veil of cloud across the moon.

Azura had been—is still—so many things and so many people, and Lucina gathers traces of her where she can. Sometimes they catch her in places she had not expected, cut at her just sharply enough not to forget.

Lucina had thought she knew enough about things that cut, the anchoring weight of a blade in her hand, how to twist her arm so the edge bit deep. But Azura had taught her, too, about silk, and gauze, and fine glittering thread—so gentle, like dipping a hand into water, and yet so quick to wound if you held it wrong.

“Something for your lady, soldier?”

Lucina, caught, starts awake and finds she’s been wasting time again, idling at the window of a tailor’s shop. The Exalt and his armies are marching north and west, towards the Searoad; they have a full day’s journey on her already, and are like to gain more if she keeps daydreaming like this.

“No, thank you,” she tells the tailor, ducking her head down and straightening the mask upon her brow. “I have to go.”

 

* * *

 

They go hand in hand, fingers entwined as they steal down, _down_ the stairs at the close of the midnight watch. Lucina’s mask is clutched in Azura’s free hand, Azura’s veils tucked into Lucina’s swordbelt, fluttering at her hip over the scabbard; Azura’s hair, Lucina thinks in her breathlessness, has always been veil enough, falling forward stubbornly to obscure her face and her peculiar eyes and her lips parting in a soft, tremulous exhale. Lucina’s fingers alone cannot stand against it, eager as they are to push it back, burying in the lengths and waves of it, again and again and again.

The torches are burning high as they pass, but it appears to Lucina that all they do is cast shadows, and it is therefore entirely too easy to back Azura flush against the wall, cradling the curve of her head in one palm before it can strike the stone. In the dark under the flame, they lean into each other. Azura’s voice never rises above a whisper in these moments, and yet it echoes all through the corridor and off Lucina’s lips when they kiss.

She breathes in long and deep. Opens her eyes.

“Azura—” And then, more strongly, as Azura’s mouth dances sideways, presses against the line where Lucina’s jawbone joins her neck, “Azura.”

“You and I are running out of time,” Azura finishes. She touches the words to the bare skin of Lucina’s throat. She does not clarify if she means _for tonight_ or _for always._

There is the temptation, always, to forget. To think herself safe whenever and wherever they touch, when the truth is there are too many versions of the truth Lucina knows how to tell. _Yes. No. I want to be with you. Will you still have me, if all we have is here?_

And so to speak for all of them, she bends her head in obeisance, and tells the only truth that matters.

“Lucina. It’s Lucina. You should have my name at least.”

“Lucina.” Azura raises one hand toward her face, trailing a thumb up the high slant of her cheekbone, as has become her habit. Something bright and splintered flickers then in her expression, some spark that makes her luminous—golden, gleaming under the fire overhead. “Will you pass the night with me, Lucina?”

Lucina knows that now this name is hers to call, in all worlds, and in the world between worlds. She does not sense she still needs to say _I would give you even more, if I could,_ not with all her masks already lost in the pool of shadows on the floor where Azura had taken them from her face and dropped them.

“Come here,” Lucina breathes, and pulls her closer.

 

* * *

 

Having stepped outside of time, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of questioning whether everything is real. She wonders, too often, if one day she will wake to a nightmare and realize she never left—that all her journeys crumble to sand when she touches them. The sword, the circlet, the butterfly mask.

Today Lucina stands on the deck of a great ship and thinks all the blue before her must surely be a dream. The gold-touched blue of a sunny sky, the midnight-dark sea cresting and curling around the vessel. The images bleed unbidden into one another, as they sometimes do when she’s left alone with her thoughts. Ocean, sky, her hair, her dress. Her voice in the water, _Lucina._

Azura is the dream that hasn’t ended. Lucina has not seen her in so many lifetimes now and yet she knows this still so clearly: there had been beauty enough to end a war, just in the swish of her skirt as she danced.

_I know. I know I will never see you again._

“Lucina?”

Here, at least, she is no longer alone. Lucina looks at her father, or the man her father was, and wonders for a moment if it would be a danger to get used to all of this. Going forward as herself. Being Lucina again.

“Lucina, you’re far away.”

And then Lucina cannot but think of a world that is neither past nor future, and of a woman with a veil over her face and a voice like a long dream. If Lucina remembers that voice, there’s a chance she had not dreamed it all—that, standing half in shadow in the corner of some accidental cousin universe, Azura had looked at her, and called her by her name.

“I’m here, Father,” she says, unafraid, and faces the sea.


End file.
